The Linux version of Chrome has been coming along fairly quickly, the latest development build of Chrome (Chromium) for Linux now works with Flash and has extension support. It is also possible to configure the options (although there are still some TODO stubs so setting a proxy isn’t possible, EDIT: Try the –proxy-server argument). Tested under Ubuntu 9.04 64bit.

★ ☄ Sweepy kitten. ☆ ☽

Update (05 Mar 2010): Google now have a proper version of Chrome with flash, themes, greasemonkey and extensions. Including .deb packages for Ubuntu (And packages for Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE). Simply grab them from the the Chrome site, no other setup needed. They will also install repositories to keep things up to date. They are ‘beta’ but there more likely to be stable than grabbing the bleeding edge ones from the chromium-team repo (there is an ‘unstable’ packages too). I was running into issues with Chromium freezing up (mainly Flash related) which are not an issue with the official Google Chrome build.

There is also a fairly good Adblock extension. It includes the same filterlists as the Firefox one. If you need to block something extra hit ctrl+shit+k and you get a handy wizard where you can just click on whatever you want to nuke.

I also recommend giving the HTML5 version of YouTube a try. It seems faster than the flash one and things like seeking are quick. Full screen has a few issues. In order to activate it you need to first popout the video using the icon up the top right of the video, although it’s much faster to popout and Flash since it doesn’t need to rebuffer the video like Flash often does. I did have some sluggishness of the controls in full screen but the video playback works fine. Also for some reason it goes back to the Flash player when I am logged into YouTube with a user account, but works fine without a login.
/update

For extensions:
Start browser with the following:chromium-browser --enable-plugins --enable-greasemonkey --enable-user-scripts --enable-extensions
Clink on a crx link (such as adsweep) and browse to chrome://extensions/ to check installation.

I was looking at some of the data from the w3counter and thought I would graph it out.

Here we can see that the usage changes very slowly, Windows does have a slight overall decline and both Linux and MacOS have increased slightly.

This shows an increase in both OSX and Linux usage up until Vista overtakes them, then they both level off, its interesting that the 2 coincide, possibly due to large scale acceptance of Vista. Mac usage seems to have fallen off slightly more than Linux usage although both are still higher than they where but not gaining as much ground as they where.

When a standard is open it allows for a huge adoption of it by anyone, anyone can use it and be sure that their data isn’t locked away and they have to deal with a specific company if they want to access their own content. Open Standards are what runs the Internet. The problem is that being an ‘Open Standard’ isn’t all that’s required. H.264 for instance is an Open Standard but its not royalty-free as there are patents on it, and it requires a licensing fee for implementation. While these licenses are cheap and easy to obtain for companies making them attractive, they block the formats for the non-commercial open source community. You are still allowing a 3rd party to dictate the requirements for access to your data.

This is where the much hated software patents come into it, you cannot distribute patented software in binary, precompiled form as a patent has to be applied to a physical object (thanks to a court case in America binary code somehow now counts as such, while other countries have various laws America is where Silicon valley is so we all loose out, some countries seen to be specifically making exceptions to allow patents to be applied on computers). You can distribute patent software in source code since its not an actual implementation of it. As for if you can legally compile that code for personal use various from country to country, there is some discussion on that here.

Firstly its important to have an royalty-free unencumbered codec for use in streaming video for things such as Firefox and Linux/Unix distributions to be able to legally play back these formats, patents are the reason that in order to support MP3 playback you have to install codecs (which in newer distributions is a lot easier and automatically setup). Commercial distros can afford to pay the patent license fees but this isn’t much help for for the open source community, or hobbyists, Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/Gentoo/Arch/BSDs etc… aren’t commercial distros, they don’t charge you so they can’t pay for the codecs and if they could pay for them then the media is still in a format that is locked away accessible on the whims of the patent holder.

Since the HTML 5 draft (due to be finalized 4 years from now in 2012) included video streaming, having a decent open codec is more important now than ever before, originally the draft had mentioned the use of Ogg however Nokia and Apple raised objections concerned about hidden ‘submarine patents’, low compression ratio and lack of hardware decoders, Nokia wanting support for H.264 (which also happens to be the codec Apple is already using for iTunes/iPod video along with AAC for audio) or alternatively leaving out streaming video and letting corporations fight it out. H.264 being impossible to include in the standard.

As for the royalty-free video codecs that around around we have, Theora, DIRAC and OMS.

Firstly there is the oldest and most widely known Theora codec, often referred to as “Ogg Theora” as its contained in the Ogg container format, not to be confused with Ogg Vorbis which is an audio codec designed to be a royalty-free alternative to MP3, also lives in the Ogg container format and is often used to provide the audio for Theora videos in Ogg format.

Theora is a project of the Xiph.Org foundation (also responsible for the royalty-free codecs, FLAC for lossless audio and Speex a voice audio codec with an extremely good compression ratio), its based on VP3 which was donated to the public by its creator On2 who dropped all claims on it.

Unfortunately is seems that Theora is now out of date and has fairly bad compression when compared to other codecs. Xpih.Org are apparently working on an improved version of Theora for HTML 5 but with the binary format locked for compatibility its unclear to me if it can be improved enough to reduce file sizes and improve quality or if its just work on improving the tools around Theora.

Xvid is apparently a royalty-free codec, originally from OpenDivX code it was forked when the DivX 4 closed source. The problem is that Xvid is based on the MPEG-4 standard which has 2 dozen companies claiming patents on it and licenses are apparently no longer being offered.

Sun’s Open Media Commons recently announced OMS Video, and open coded, the audio component is using the video component is based on H.261 which is out of the 17 year patent restriction, then adding newer unpatented technologies. Currently there isn’t anything from them yet code wise. Another worry is another Open Media Commons project, DReaM, its a DRM specification, as far as DRM goes it seems less evil since its designed to be open and royalty-free itself but its still DRM, in the end as long as the DRM isn’t built into OMS it shouldn’t be a problem but I have a small concern that they will use OMS as an infection vector for DReaM. The announcement and specification overview don’t mention DReaM at all other than saying its also part of Open Media Commons so its probably not an issue but worth watching. Fortunately DRM is its own worst enemy, DReaM is supposed to bring an open royalty free DRM system to allow music to interoperate but DRM seems less about protecting music and more about online music retailers locking clients to their system/devices, one someone has a whole database of DRM’d songs they will have to buy hardware that supports it for ever and keep shopping at the same place, they can never leave (at least not without breaking the DRM or loosing all their music), you can read more about why DRM sucks at the Defective By Design website.

The BBC who have been experimenting with streaming video created Dirac (wikipedia) which is designed to be completely unencumbered by using patent free technologies. Wikipedia says it is in the same range of compression as h264. There is an implementation of DIRAC called Schrödinger which has libraries, gstreamer plug-ins and is intended to get it in the Ogg container.

Recently Adobe with their Open Screen Project, opened flash and the flv/fl4 format for use without license restrictions, the swf specification and the flv specifications are already published. This is great news for projects like Gnash however my main concern however is that flv has technologies using patents in it. For instance flv in Flash 9 supports AAC for audio and the Wikipedia article on ACC says:
“…a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs, that require encoding or decoding. It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement.”. This makes it seem like even though the license restriction is removed, the open source community will benefit from having the API’s available but not be able to actual make a binary version of the flash client. You won’t be able to expect flash to be built into Firefox or shipped with Ubuntu. The real clients of Adobe will still likely need a license from Adobe unless they want to go to patent holders such as AAC and independently obtain licenses (likely to end up costing more in the end). Another format used is MP3 which has a whole load of parent issues, the MP3 decoding patents run out around 2012 and the encoding later around 2016 (Ive seen various different times but their fairly close, there is a big list of mp3 patents but it doesn’t say what is needed for decoding/encoding and whats optional, the latest is 2017), flv also uses yet another commercial proprietary codec Nellymoser.

These are just the audio codecs for the video there is H.263 since Flash 6 and as of Flash 8VP6, I haven’t found much information on the license issues around them but they do seem to be patented. Wikipedia says “As of September 2006, an open-source implementation of the decoder is part of the libavcodec project, though producing or dealing with VP6 video streams inside libavcodec/libavformat seems to be discouraged and/or refused due to clashes between the ffmpeg’s developers and On2 technologies by a claim of Intellectual Property and Trade Secrets Infringement made by the corporation itself.”

As for Flash itself I have no idea about what other patents on the technology exist when we live in a world where anti-aliasing fonts is patented. In order for flash to really be open source friendly we would need to see it adopt patent free codecs for flv (such as DIRAC, Vorbis, Theora or OMS).

While Linux probably isn’t quite ready to be a operating system choice for gamers, Linux users who happen to want to game are in for a treat.

Recently released was a native client for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars which I have been having fun playing the last couple of days. Many people have been claiming it as a BF2 rip off (mostly BF2 players) however the gameplay itself is completely different even if there are quite a few similarities (plus BF wasn’t the first game to implement its class system or vehicles, just one of the more memorable, also its something that UT2003 already did). Its a much faster passed game so there is very little waiting in a corner waiting for someone to come and capture a flag or running across the map for 5 min until you get to one, although a lot of the team play has been stripped down but this just makes it play more like a standard FPS which isn’t bad, just different. There is a list of important to note differences for BF players here.

And out next month is Unreal Tournament 3 which is getting a native client, theres a Windows beta demo out and a Linux one on its way, when ETQW is mentioned people generally cry that UT3 is better, personally I’m going to buy both although its hard to tell from prerelease hype and a beta demo exactly how good a game is going to be. They both seem like great games, and since UT3 has both FPS and BF style gameplay it should be flexible enough to keep interest.

Source games such as Team Fortress 2 are working great under WINE with the same performance as under Windows (You might loose %5 but make up for it with lower lag, the advanced shaders can apparently be enabled with a setting if you want), with the whole Orange Box going for $50USD (About $56 AUD thanks to America ruining its economy). The latest version of Wine 0.9.47 runs Steam great, although I did run into a problem with purchasing Orange Box through PayPal since it opened PayPal in Firefox but then Firefox wouldn’t execute the steam://paypal/return command, I was worried for a while that it was going to charge me without adding the game but PayPal showed no payment, I coped out and booted to a windows partition and brought it through there but its probably possible to manually pass the command with something like “wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/Steam.exe paypal/return” or set the protocol association in Firefox to run the command but I haven’t looked at it too much. now I’m awaiting my TF2 and HL2E2 download, already beat Portal which was a fun game although a bit too short hoping there is a squeal in the not too distant future. Valve recently posted that job for a Linux games programmer and have already ported source to use OpenGL for the PS2 so we could see a native Linux client in the future.

EDIT: I just tried HL2:E2 seems to have some graphical problems with the shaders turning everything bright colours, running without them causes crashes however you can run with the game in DirectX 8 mode and loose some graphical detail, this is probably something that will be fixed fairly soon since it seems like a simple bug, they already fixed some similar problems with Portal.
EDIT2: Use wine 0.9.46 not 0.9.47 this works without the -dxlevel 80 flag, I had the same problem with TF2 that I did on HL2E2, works great with 0.9.46.

Wine’s seems to have most of DirectX emulated, the main problem is a few minor bugs that crop up in games, such as the mouse cursor being stuck or leaving the window etc… Most of the bugs that are left are minor but make games unplayable and are often specific to only the one game. Unfortunately there are enough of these that most games don’t run but its certainly getting there, presumably a lot of these are in the target for Wine 1.0

Wine is improving quite fast, probably faster than new specifications are being produced and with many games ensuring that DX9 is supported due to the slow adoption of DX10 and with the OpenGL 3.0 specification approaching release its might make implementing the DirectX>OpenGL wrapper a whole lot quicker since it seems to support many of the same features, we could see WINE running more games off the shelf than ones that don’t within a few years.

Virtualization could also be another great way to run games under Linux but with %100 compatibility although requiring a copy of Windows, all that would be needed is a way to allow direct access to the video card, this can actually be done under Xen but requires a 2nd video card since the first one will be locked by the BIOS at boot. Alternatively a DirectX>OpenGL wrapper in the windows install could work, I hear this is how parallels works using the WINE one, but it might sacrifice some compatibility and speed. OpenGL can already run from a virtualized environment with VMGL, with this and WINE’s DirectX it might even be possible already. Maybe some official support from nVidia/ATI would expedite things.

Theres some interesting history about WINE’s DirectX implementation and information about a DirectX 10 implementation being underway here.